Foxtail Millet Essay

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Introduction
Foxtail millet [Setaria italica (L.) P.Beauv.] is one of the oldest cultivated crop in the world (Chang 1968). China has been identified as the center of origin of this special crop (Vavilov 1926), where foxtail millet was domesticated and selected as grain food as early as 8700 years ago (Lu et al.2009). The geographical origin of foxtail millet based on cytological studies indicated that wild ancestor of foxtail millet is S. viridis (Li et al. 1945). It was the most important food crop of the Neolithic culture in China. It belongs to family Poaceae and subfamily Panicoideae and supposed to be originated in Eastern Asia probably China. It is a diploid (2n=2x=18), self-pollinating, C4 panicoid crop with a small genome (490 Mb) size (Andrew et al., 2009). About 90% of global millet production is utilized in the developing countries (FAO, 1990) and 38.6% of total world millet is produced by India alone (FAO, 1995). Core collection of 155 and 152 accessions in foxtail millet have been reported by Upadhyaya et al. (2008, 2011) and Lata et al. (2011a, b) respectively. Lata et al., 2011a have also developed a core collection of 107 accessions of foxtail millet , which is being used for determining population structure and allele mining of important agronomic and abiotic stress related traits. Nirmalakumari and Vetriventhan (2010) evaluated 741 germplasm accessions of foxtail millet and established that better yield potential could be attained by exploiting germplasm with more productive tillers, intermediate panicle length and medium flowering time. Core of 220 accessions was selected from 1482 world collection of foxtail millet by using power core (http://genebank.rda.go.kr/powercore) Jayarama Gowda et al.,2012, which i...

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...leaf blade width(FLFLW), basal tiller number(BASTIL), and plant height(PLTHT) were recorded by averaging five plant for each accession.
ANOVAs were calculated using the IASRI website portal (online analysis of data; http://iasri.res.in/analysis/online_analysis.htm) for all the quantitative and qualitative traits. Among the quantitative trait test weight, days to 50% flowering, flag leaf length, panicle exertion, plant height and yield per plant were showing highly significant variation (Table 1). Among the qualitative traits apical sterility and inflorescence lobe, inflorescence compactness, inflorescence shape, lobe compactness, leaf senescence, degree of lodging at maturity and sheath pubescence (Table 2) was highly significant variation, this is showing that core comprising accessions were highly diverse and truly representing the variation of whole collection.

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